Category Archives: Web Article Review

facts and figures on U.S. manufacturing, jobs, and trade with China

This blog post summarizes a famous paper from 2016 called The China Shock. The post points out that a number of things in paper were misunderstood by general audiences, in some cases because it was politically convenient to do so.

Now, before I get into it I will say that I have some personal perspective on this. I come from a former manufacturing town in Appalachia and many of my relatives were employed in the furniture and textile industry there at one time. By the 1990s, these factories were closing as jobs were moving to Asia, where labor costs were much lower. The economic pain and attendant social problems are very real, and I have seen them firsthand. So some communities were in fact hit very hard. The U.S. government had a “Trade Adjustment Assistance” program that was supposed to retrain people, but it was just too little, too late and not all effective. There has been major brain drain with the younger generations leaving town for better opportunities, and the people left behind are in a very destitute situation. So some groups of people, in some locations, were very badly hurt by free trade, even if there is an argument to make that the country as a whole benefitted from low-cost goods and moving to higher-value-added industries.

Anyway, the facts and figures based on this article:

  • The word “shock” in economics means something different than what it means it newspaper headlines. It means an unforeseen or outside event. It doesn’t necessarily have to be large or “shocking” in an emotional sense.
  • The original paper estimated a loss of about a million manufacturing jobs over about a decade after China joined the WTO in 2001. This should be put in the context that the number of U.S. “goods producing jobs” has held steady at about 20 million while service sector jobs have boomed by around 100 million over the past 50 years. Although another chart shows a loss of about 8 million “manufacturing jobs” over roughly this same time, so “goods producing” and “manufacturing” must have different definitions. Either way, manufacturing certainly declined in relative importance to the economy and in the absolute number of jobs represented. But outsourcing to China specifically is only part of this. (I would note however that Chinese businesses themselves are outsourcing to Southeast Asia, and I don’t know how that gets accounted for in these numbers.)
  • Despite the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, U.S. manufacturing output has not declined over this time period. It has stayed approximately constant since 2000, dipping during recessions and then bouncing back after each recession. The reason output can stay constant while jobs decrease is increased productivity due to automation.
  • Bottom line: The original paper concluded that competition from China explained about 12% of overall manufacturing job losses during the decade after 2001, and manufacturing job losses were about 1.5% of jobs in the overall economy. Overall job gains were greater than job losses during this period, although some individual workers, towns, and regions were more heavily impacted than others (like my relatives in Appalachia).

I generally support more or less free trade. But if we are going to trade freely, we need a safety net for people who are hurt. We could do this with generous unemployment benefits and retraining programs. We could help people relocate to places with jobs. We could provide much better communication and transportation infrastructure allowing them to commute regionally to places with jobs. We could educate their children so they are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. We could institute a value added tax on our productive, growing economy and use it to provide services or cash to workers. We could invest even more in research and development to make our economy even more productive and growing. We could invest in neighboring countries to help them be more productive and growing, import cheap stuff from them, and reduce some of the migration pressure on our borders. We could refer to these as “common sense” policies.

The Tangerine Shitgibbon

Charlie Stross has a vivid imagination. Take the genocidal American police state in the last three novels of his Merchant Princes series. I don’t want to ruin the plot for you – let’s just say that in the last three (written in 2017-2021) of the nine-novel series the U.S. is an authoritarian state run by a genocidal maniac and using advanced surveillance technology based on cell phone tracking and facial recognition. You have to commit to reading thousands of pages to get to this point, but I highly recommend it. But it’s just fiction, right?

Now here is Stross’s blog post from April 7, 2025.

The same face recognition and IMSI tracking tech that allowed the Biden administration’s Department of Justice to track down a few thousand January 6 rioters is now better-developed, and when the generative AI bubble collapses (as seems to be already happening) there is going to be a lot of surplus data center capacity that the emergent dictatorship can deploy for crunching on that data set to identify protesters. There won’t be many trials (except possibly a handful of show trials and executions as red meat for the base if they run true to form for a dictatorship): the rule of law in the United States is already being undermined as rapidly as happened in the Third Reich, and rather than overloading the prison system they’ll just dig mass graves. (If you’re really lucky the response will be more restrained—but those marchers won’t be getting any social security checks or medicare, will be blacklisted by employers with government contracts, harassed by the police,and so on.) …

One final note: on April 20th (entirely coincidentally, the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth) a point Department of Defense and Homeland Security report is due to recommend whether the 1807 Insurrection Act can be invoked, allowing the use of the Army and National Guard to crack down on “insurrectionists”, whoever they may be—effectively a declaration of martial law…Upshot: I think I was wrong as little as a week ago. The USA may very well be moving into a pre-revolutionary crisis within the next month, with an authoritarian administration seizing emergency powers and preparing to execute an increasingly violent crackdown on the public.

If you are a US citizen or resident you should be very cautious about what you say in the comments on this blog entry.

Well, if he is right I don’t need to get myself in trouble on his blog, I am probably already in plenty of trouble right here on this one so why not dig the hole a bit deeper right now?

Imaginatively paranoid or prescient, time will tell. The technological tools of tyranny have been here since the Russian czar/Nazis/Stalin/Stasi/J. Edgar Hoover started using file cabinets at least, and probably back to the Inquisition or earlier. We are seeing the surveillance take a sinister turn though with the tracking and scoring of people in Xinjiang, Palestine, Libya, and Syria recently. Why would we think the New Management in the U.S. would not be tracking and scoring people? This is basically just marketing technology, and was probably invented here. You can build a statistical model of every American and give score them based on how many dollars you think they are likely to spend on whatever widget you are selling. Then you can target the top 20%, 50%, or 80% with ads. Or, you can use the same logic and the same technology and start dropping bombs on these individuals and their extended families. So the technology has existed, although it seems to be getting more sinister and more accessible all the time. It is our liberal democratic institutions that are supposed to prevent the tools from being used for tyranny.

the dark enlightenment part deux

Continuing my thread on the so-called dark enlightenment, the term was actually coined by a British philosopher named Nick Land, following up on Curtis Yarvin’s ideas. From Wikipedia:

Land’s work with CCRU, as well as his pre-Dark Enlightenment writings, have all been influential to the political philosophy of accelerationism, an idea resembling that of the “fatal strategy” of “ecstasy” in the earlier work of Jean Baudrillard, where “a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization.”[citation needed] Along with the other members of CCRU, Land wove together ideas from the occult, cybernetics, science fiction, and poststructuralist philosophy to try to describe the phenomena of techno-capitalist acceleration.

Okay, up to this point it all sounds at least Singularity-adjacent. Now, I thought the Singularity was just good clean science fiction fun. But somehow the ideas have seeped into right-wing thinking. Anyway, Nick Land is the guy who came up with the term The Dark Enlightenment and wrote a long online manifesto called…The Dark Enlightenment. Now, before I link to I have to say this contains some racist ideas, so I link to it in the same spirit I might link to something like Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kampf – you can read it for historical/academic interest and to try to understand what might have been going through the diseased mind of the person who wrote it. Again, the reason this matters is that it seems to have influenced individuals with some power over all our lives, possibly including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance. So without further ado, here is the link. [2/5/26 update: I have removed this because it is on a malware watchlist. It is not too hard to find with a web search.]

[tick tock tick tock time passing]

I skimmed through the thing. And mostly it is just…dumb. It’s an endless word salad of very loosely related ideas and free association. Amid the racist drivel about IQ and eugenics there are some ideas about city-states run by corporate boards of directors, in which citizens are free to shop around for a jurisdiction that suits them.

There is some cheerleading for Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. I lived in Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore at the very tail end of his life, and I read his very long book From Third World to First while I was there. I also read William Gibson’s essay Disneyland with the Death Penalty in the Singapore national public library and nobody beat me up. That would have been around 2012 or so, and from what I have heard that book would not have been available and might even have gotten me in trouble even 15 years earlier. Anyway, about Lee Kuan Yew – he imprisoned some political opponents without trial and controlled the way his people were allowed to dress and act up to a point. But overall, in my view, he was a selfless person who had the welfare of his people in mind in all his decisions and actions. He believed strongly in what you might call “meritocracy” in a dictionary sense, where policies were designed by economists and lawyers and politics was not allowed to get in the way of these policies. He provided housing and education for all his people. He cracked down vigorously on any form of organized crime. And he cracked down on any form of racist speech and put strong policies in place to protect ethnic and religious minorities, which in Singapore means people of Indian and Malay descent, who are largely but not all Muslim. To this day, as far as I know, there are no statues of Lee Kuan Yew because he did not want there to be.

But there are not going to be many leaders as selfless as Lee Kuan Yew. For every Lee Kuan Yew there are going to be a million mediocre leaders and maybe a Hitler or Stalin if we are unlucky. Ordinary people given the kind of power he wielded are going to be corrupted, and genocidal psychopaths are going to do mass murder. His sometimes brutal embrace of economic theory and evidence-driven policy is completely opposite the made-up, corrupt, fantasy-based shooting from the hip we are seeing from the Trump administration in 2025. If Singapore is the Dark Enlightenment, Donald Trump is a dark lump of shit spiralling around a clogged drain.

So a quasi-libertarian city-state run by a board of directors on a floating island or, exercising my imagination here, a space station someday? Maybe. Turning existing large countries with democratic or at least (small R) republican governments into these city-states. No, this is pure fantasy and not even the “common sense” variety. It makes no sense. If we want citizens to be “shareholders”, focus on policies that promote economic growth, institute a value added tax with minimal loopholes, and then return that value to the shareholders in the form of either cash or services. There is no practical alternative to majority rule with the human rights of minorities protected. If we are worried about the majority making bad decisions, educate the people. In the U.S. at the moment we are going 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

What is the “dark enlightenment”?

I could probably spend a few posts on this one, but basically I don’t think there is a coherent ideology here. But of course, when it comes to politics, that doesn’t really matter. What matters much more is who is motivated by a set of loosely related, sometimes contradictory semi-ideas, how powerful the motivated people are, and what actions they choose to take. And as you may see if I really get into it, some of the people potentially motivated by this mess of ideas include Elon Musk and J.D. Vance.

Let’s start with Curtis Yarvin, aka “Mencius Moldbug”. Here is how a July 2024 Politico article describes him:

Yarvin doesn’t hold any official title or office — he is an ex-computer programmer turned blogger, having first risen to prominence on the online right in the 2010s while blogging under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” But he’s often cited as the “house philosopher” of the New Right, chiefly for his promotion of the “neo-reactionary” (or “NRx”) movement…

Like Deneen, Yarvin and his NRx followers reject the quest for “progress” as the core of political life. As Yarvin told Vanity Fair in 2022, “The fundamental premise of liberalism is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.” Instead, Yarvin believes that American democracy has denigrated into a corrupt oligarchy, run by elites who strive to consolidate their power rather than serve the public interest. The solution, Yarvin argues, is for the American oligarchy to give way to a monarchical leader styled after a start-up CEO — a “national CEO,” [or] what’s called a dictator,” as Yarvin has put it — who can de-bug the American political order like a computer programmer de-bugging some bad code…

Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration.

But get into the Wikipedia entry on Yarvin and there is some darker stuff.

Yarvin has been described as a “neo-reactionary”, “neo-monarchist” and “neo-feudalist” who “sees liberalism as creating a Matrix-like totalitarian system, and who wants to replace American democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy”.[11][12][13][14] He has defended the institution of slavery, and has suggested that certain races may be more naturally inclined toward servitude than others.[3][15] He has claimed that whites have higher IQs than black people, and opposes US civil rights programs.

Yarvin has influenced some prominent Silicon Valley investors and Republican politicians, with venture capitalist Peter Thiel described as his “most important connection”.[16] Political strategist Steve Bannon has read and admired his work.[17] U.S. Vice President JD Vance “has cited Yarvin as an influence himself”.[18][19][20] Michael Anton, the State Department Director of Policy Planning during Trump’s second presidency, has also discussed Yarvin’s ideas.[2] In January 2025, Yarvin attended a Trump inaugural gala in Washington; Politico reported he was “an informal guest of honor” due to his “outsize[d] influence over the Trumpian right”.,,[21]

Yarvin argues for a “neo-cameralist” philosophy based on Frederick the Great of Prussia’s cameralism.[43] In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose “shareholders” (large owners) elect an executive with total power, but who must serve at their pleasure.[40] The executive, unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, could rule efficiently much like a CEO-monarch.[40] Yarvin admires Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism, and the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime. He sees the US as soft on crime, dominated by economic and democratic delusions.[39]

The guy doesn’t seem like a nice guy to me, but I will at least say on his behalf that he has publicly renounced racism and anti-Semitism.

It’s not too hard to imagine the so-called “tech bros” thinking that an artificial intelligence could serve as a benevolent dictator. But even if we had a robot dictator, some human or group of humans would have to initially decide the ground rules for “benevolence”.

what’s new with humanoid robots?

ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, and Claude may have helped me speed up some computer-based work tasks over the past year or so, but they still can’t clean my bathroom. This is what I really want to see to believe the robot era has really arrived. This article reads like a press release, but Nvidia says it has an “open-source, pretrained but customizable foundation model that’s designed to expedite the development and capabilities of humanoid robots”. So that’s something, but I am not hopeful it will be cleaning my bathroom or doing my dishes in 2025.

comparing MAGA to European right-wingers

This (paywalled) Financial Times article compares survey results in the World Values Survey by political party. What is really striking to me is that the U.S. right is off the scale compared to the German, French, or Italian “far right” parties we are hearing about in the news. I didn’t dig into all the details but if this is a survey of the public based on their stated party affiliations, it is possible the right-wing politicians in Europe are much farther right than their respective publics. It is also interesting that this result shows the German right as left of center, while the Australian, French and UK left are right of center. So I am taking all this with somewhat of a grain of salt without understanding all the details, but still it shows that survey responses of the U.S. public identifying with MAGA are way out there.

house sale price premiums by month and city

Zillow has some data on how much above average home prices are by month of the year and by US city. In general, prices are higher by about 1-3% in March-June. I assume this has something to do with the U.S. school year. It may be somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy though. Last time I was in the home buying market, which was almost exactly 10 years ago, I started looking for listings in January, but there really was nothing to look at until March. So people in my city (Philadelphia) don’t start listing until March, and by the time you go through the process it seems like most closings are going to be in the May-June time frame (precisely when mine was). I wonder if refinancings show up as home sales in this data though, or if they have some way of knowing when the properties actually change hands. That could skew the data because people can refinance any time of year, and they are likely to refinance when interest rates are relatively low and prices therefore relatively high.

defensive gun use

Rutgers has some facts and figures on defensive gun use in the United States. It is worth noting that “use” includes simply showing or telling someone you find threatening that you have a gun.

  • People who have experienced gun violence or know someone who has experienced gun violence, including suicides, are more likely to own guns.
  • 8.3% of people who own guns have used them at some point. 4.7% showed the gun to someone, 3.8% told someone they had a gun (and they really did), 1.1% said they fired but not at a person, and 1.2% said they fired at a person.

The article doesn’t really come out and say it, but the gist is really that people who own guns are at greater risk of being harmed by guns than people who do not. This is counterintuitive and very few people are swayed by evidence these days, of course. The policy prescription: “Of primary importance will be efforts to shift the narrative around firearms to deemphasize DGU as a common outcome. In doing so, policy efforts can be decoupled from efforts to prioritize safety through a lens of self-defense and instead center on efforts to reduce the risk of injury and death associated with firearm access.”

how a US-Iran war could escalate

Here I will risk covering a fast moving current event. If I am right, I get to say I told you so as the world goes down in flames. Here is a scenario envisioned in one random blog post:

  • The US bombs Houthi military targets (and civilians) in Yemen – happening now, March 21, 2025.
  • Houthis attack US naval ships with missiles and drones (happening now) and achieve some damage (hasn’t happened yet).
  • The US blames the attack on Iran.
  • The US attacks Iran.
  • Iran attacks US bases, oil and gas infrastructure in surrounding countries such as UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

It’s not mentioned in this article, but I have seen elsewhere, suggestions that Trump might consider low-yield nuclear weapons. I can also imagine a scenario where, in the fog of war, Israel initiates a nuclear attack and claims it is pre-empting an Iranian nuclear attack.

Let’s hope none of this comes to pass. It would result in enormous loss of life, possibly cause a world-wide recession, and unleash the nuclear genie that has been successfully bottled up since 1945.

some policies to combat inequality

This article in the blog Urbanomics has some ideas on what can be done to combat rising inequality. The blog is India focused, but the suggestions are more or less general.

  • Increase minimum wage.
  • Increase labor’s bargaining power “through institutional (unions, workplace management councils, etc.) and regulatory measures. At some time in future, broad caps on the salary and compensation ratios across levels becoming a norm cannot be ruled out.”
  • Stop exempting gig and contract work from various laws and policies [things like not requiring the entity hiring them to provide health care and other benefits?]
  • Labour-intensive sectors should become the focus of industrial policy. Scarce resources should not be wasted on low-labour-intensity sectors like semiconductor fabrication or data centres… internships, apprentices, reduction in EPF and other costs, wage support for new entrants, industrial policy support through employment generation-linked incentives, etc. [this one is more in a developing country context I suppose]

All this seems…complicated…to me. But maybe these are politically feasible policies. Simple but maybe politically infeasible policies would be to just raise taxes on the rich and powerful and redistribute the proceeds to the masses, as cash, services directly provided by the government, or services indirectly subsidized by the government. In the U.S., perhaps taxes wouldn’t have to be raised as much as we think if we shifted away from some of the massive hidden subsidies we already have – low capital gains tax rates, the cap on social security payroll taxes, deduction of mortgage interest, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage, gas taxes that support highways but not public transportation, and many others. All of this would be politically difficult, of course. But with the Democrats seemingly having become the party of no big ideas, perhaps there is not so much to lose if somebody were to start proposing some.